Spoken UyghurModern Uyghur is an Eastern Turkic language. Most of the seven to ten million native speakers of Uyghur live in northwestern China, where Uyghur is also the lingua franca of various other ethnic groups. A smaller Uyghur speaking community is politically and culturally active in Central Asia. As the predominant indigenous language in a crucial area that bridges the frontiers of multiple states, and as a language of great interest to comparative